


Nightly Visitations

by RoseByAnyOtherName (badxwolfxrising)



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-24
Updated: 2015-02-24
Packaged: 2018-03-16 17:02:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3496091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badxwolfxrising/pseuds/RoseByAnyOtherName
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor's wife has been dead for a very long time. Try telling that to her in the middle of the night, though.  Can be read from the perspective of the Doctor of your choosing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nightly Visitations

The Doctor’s wife has been dead for a very long time. She died in the Last Great Time War, was killed by a chortling Dalek who shot her repeatedly, burning through all her regenerations until she’d finally been silent and still and just as dead as any of the soldiers killed on the front lines.

Try telling that to her in the middle of the night, though. She would come to him sometimes and wake him up in his bedroom on the TARDIS, looking pensive. It wouldn’t be so disturbing, not anymore than any other nightmare, except that lately when she’d been appearing to him, she looked especially dead. The beautiful ginger hair she’d had in her last regeneration was no longer lustrous, but falling out in clumps. When she touched him, her greying skin sloughed off her fingers, revealing the polished white bone underneath. Her eyes were sunken into her skull, and her face looked pale and sickly, the skin of her lips waxy and wrong. She looks not like she had when she died, but like a thing that has been dead for a while, which the Doctor supposes is only fitting for a nightmare.

“What are you doing here?” he finally asks her.

“I can’t sleep. It’s so cold where I am, husband,” she whispers, her voice full of dust and death and time.

“You’re dead, and you aren’t really here. You’re just a dream,” he tells his dead wife.

“They never told us dying would be so, so cold. But you...you were there, watching me die. And you did nothing. You let me and our children die, husband. Why?”

“I was trapped, there was nothing I could do but watch silently or open my mouth and get killed myself. And it haunts me to this day. Obviously. Because you’re here now, which is just proof that on some level, I still feel some guilt and responsibility about what happened, even if I tell myself there was nothing I could have done. Why are you here, really?”

“Because you’re here,” she says, placing one cold, waxen hand on his cheek. “Being dead is lonely. I miss you, the children miss you.”

“How are the children?” he finds himself asking this ghostly vision, absurdly.

“Dead,” she says, with a mirthless chuckle. “But they’re adjusting surprisingly well, under the circumstances. They would come, if they could. Maybe next time.”

“You can’t actually be here right now,” he repeats, more for his own benefit and reassurance. “This is a dream.”

“My whole existence feels like a dream now,” his dead wife says sadly, and she lets her fingers trail coolly down his arm. He shivers at the touch, which feels surprisingly solid for something that’s supposedly not actually there.

“Where are you existing, exactly?” he asks.

She purses her lips and shakes her head, then brings one finger to her lips to indicate she cannot say.

“Well what the hell am I supposed to do with that?” he questions, frustrated.

“It’s the in-between place, but I cannot say any more,” she whispers mysteriously.

“Right,” he shrugs helplessly.

“There are some things, husband, you’re not meant to know.”

“I’m still not entirely convinced that you’re not a figment of my imagination,” he tells her.

She just smiles at him and places her hand on his bicep. She squeezes tightly, painfully. It feels like a frigid, iron vise gripping his arm. “Whatever you say, husband.”

When he wakes the next morning, there’s something that might be grave dirt at the foot of the bed and a distinctly hand-shaped bruise on his arm. The Doctor tells himself again that he must have gone sleepwalking to the TARDIS gardens, because the other alternative is one he’s not presently willing to entertain, even as he absentmindedly rubs at the dark-purple bruise forming on his arm. Gallifrey is gone, his wife is gone, so how could there be grave dirt here in his bed now? Well, there can’t be of course.

The bruise is smaller than his own hand, though.

This is why he rarely sleeps anymore.


End file.
